To be quite honest, I never liked the late Aaron
Swartz - not that I ever met him. In fact, to be extremely honest (and I genuinely regret this), I was happy when I heard of his legal problems. Why? Is this just because I'm a bad person?

Maybe. For one thing, failed child prodigies always have it in for non-failed
child prodigies. For another, deplorable Ashkenazi ghetto
inbreeding produced a world in which a picture of me at any age is
easily mistaken for Aaron Swartz at the same age - which is just creepy. And at whatever age, reliable reports have it that the deceased equaled or
even exceeded my own record as a supremely obnoxious little twerp.

But finally, there was Aaron's (isn't it a sad comment on our age
that the only address which seems appropriate for a dead 26-year-old
man is his first name, as if he was still a teenager? But aren't
we all still teenagers these days?) soul-devouring Chomskyism. While Aaron was alive, this was easy to resent. Since he is dead, what remains can only be regret. So, let's regret.

Y'all can blame who you like for Aaron's suicide. I blame Noam Chomsky, whose supercharged blue pills have devastated kilotons of innocent young brains as a regrettable side effect of winning Professor Chomsky enormous fame and wealth. The typical teenage victim knows, with every bone in his naturally rebellious body, that he's grown up in Plato's cave. Our Professor, renowned the world over but especially in Venezuela, agrees! And helpfully guides his innocent charge to an oddly well-lit shaft in the back of the cave which leads down to... an even deeper cave. Coach Sandusky had nothin' on him.

How does this work? Aaron, born one of humanity's natural nobles, grows up in a century cleansed by military force of its own cultural heritage, in which all surviving noble ideals are leftist ideals. No one ever had a chance to tell him that his only honorable option was to live in the past. And in any case, that option was probably too antisocial even for Aaron Swartz. He must be noble, he cannot retreat to mere selfish bourgeois money-grubbing and family-rearing. So he must be an activist.

So he takes the blue pill. He starts with a blue joint or two and gradually works his way up to the blue heroin. He believes in his century's narrative as it is - except more so. Why not more so? For even without marinating his brain in Chomsky, what bright young person can miss all the trouble our polity has in living up to its own comm - I mean, "progressive" - ideals?

The Nazis are beaten, supposedly. But somehow the seeds of autocracy are everywhere. Wherever you see a corporation, you see a little Third Reich with its own pompous CEO-fuehrer. Wherever you see property, especially inherited property (have you noticed the increasingly universal meme of saying "privilege" when you mean "property?"), you see a little king of a little kingdom, whose answer to "why do you own this" is no more than "because I do."

As an Aaron Swartz bred on Horace instead of John Dewey might have remarked, tamen usque recurret. Of course the utopia is unachievable. As a geek world which had not Chomsky but Mosca on its dogeared hackerspace bookshelves would know in its bones, autocracy is universal and cannot be repealed, only concealed. Always and everywhere, strong minorities rule weak majorities.

You cannot drive out nature with a pitchfork. You can drive out great oaks with an axe. But you already did that. What did you get? Weeds - giant, pitchfork-proof weeds. Autocratic and unaccountable power in the modern democracy has been dispersed, but not in any way dissolved. Sovereignty remains conserved.

Indeed by any metric there is far more woody biomass than ever before. The US Attorney's office has also its little kings, no more accountable than Henry VII. Who took orders only from God, just like any "apolitical" "civil servant." But at least there was only one Henry VII.

Broadly speaking, decision-making authority (ie, power) in a modern democracy is divided between two kinds of people: lobbyists and activists. Lobbyists are only interested in money. Activists are only interested in power. Sometimes a great nexus of corruption thrusts forth a figure of genius, such as Al Gore, who dazzles us with a talent for both.

And then of course, we have the poor passionate true believers. I love the Obama administration because it is so easy to tell the Aaron Swartzes, the Glenn Greenwalds, the Chomskyites who actually believe in Chomsky (which may, or may not, include the master himself - who ever knows?), from the rest of the Morgul-army. I'm quite convinced that Glenn Greenwald really has no idea at all why liberal public opinion stopped giving a damn about torture in 2008.

Here's how Chomsky kills: first, he sets you to the pitchfork. In the Plato's cave of Chomsky it is not nature, of course, that you are driving out with a pitchfork. It is black, unnatural, fascist conspiracy. Which is naturally everywhere - and yet, everywhere in embryo. Giant terrifying kings and dictators are nowhere to be hacked and sawn. It was your ancestors who had this privilege. Today, in a diminished age, the enemy is no more than the seeds and sprouts of advancing black reaction, whose every great stump is crowned with dangerous suckers.

And while these seedlings are everywhere, each is small and weak. Individually, they yield quite handily to the hoe, giving the stalwart farmer a sense of progress and victory. If only a local sense. For the activist who is only really interested in power, this is quite enough. He just wants to be part of something that's fighting something else. It's a normal human drive. And of course, his team is the winning team, which he likes quite well.

You can be this farmer, and live a happy, successful and fulfilling life. But be sure to focus on the seedlings. Or the old dead stumps. Notice, however, that the vines which slew those old trees have grown so great and woody that they almost resemble trees themselves... and you are in for a different experience. At the very least, you'll need to come back with something sharper than a pitchfork.

The truth is that the weapons of "activism" are not weapons which the weak can use against the strong. They are weapons the strong can use against the weak. When the weak try to use them against the strong, the outcome is... well... suicidal.

Who was stronger - Dr. King, or Bull Connor? Well, we have a pretty good test for who was stronger. Who won? In the real story, overdogs win. Who had the full force of the world's strongest government on his side? Who had a small-town police force staffed with backward hicks? In the real story, overdogs win.

"Civil disobedience" is no more than a way for the overdog to say to the underdog: I am so strong that you cannot enforce your "laws" upon me. I am strong and might makes right - I give you the law, not you me. Don't think the losing party in this conflict didn't try its own "civil disobedience." And even its own "active measures." Which availed them - what? Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.

In the real world in which we live, the weak had better know their own weakness. If they would gather their strength, do it! But without fighting, even "civil disobedience." To break a law is to fight. Those who fight had better be strong. Those who are not strong, had better not fight.

And this is how Chomskyism killed Aaron Swartz and may yet get its hands on a similar figure, Julian Assange. You know, when I read that Assange had his hands on a huge dump of DoD and State documents, I figured we would never see those cables. Sure enough, the first thing he released was some DoD material.

Why? Well, obviously, Assange knew the score. He knew that Arlington is weak and Georgetown is strong. He knew that he could tweak Arlington's nose all day long and party on it, making big friends in high society, and no one would even think about reaching out and touching him. Or so I thought.

In fact, my cynicism was unjustified. In fact, Assange turned out to be a true believer, not a canny schemer. He was not content to wield his sword against the usual devils of the Chomsky narrative. Oh no, the poor fscker believed that he was actually there to take on the actual powers that be. Who are actually, of course, unlike the cartoon villains... strong. If he didn't know that... he knows it now!

Better to be a live dog than a dead hero. But had Aaron Swartz plugged his laptop into the Exxon internal network and downloaded everything Beelzebub knows about fracking, he would be a live hero to this day. Why? Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest. Your prosecutor would have to actually believe he was living in the Chomsky world. Which he can't, because that narrative is completely inconsistent with the real world he goes to work in every day.

But when you take on a genuinely respected institution - whether State or MIT - your "civil disobedience" has all the prospects of George Wallace in the schoolhouse door. Listen to Swartz:

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time
to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil
disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored,
make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff
that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret
databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for
Guerilla Open Access.

You'll note the tone of this manifesto, which is the typical vaunting, bullying tone of the powerful addressing the powerless. Your so-called laws are worthless, it says, because law means nothing without power. It is we who have the power, we who make the real laws.

Yes, indeed! Today, it is really the progressive activist who is closest to the essential truth of all political endeavor - the fact that Might makes Right. (What pathetic scraps of the American peasant right remain will probably figure this out shortly before my cat discovers the Higgs boson. And I don't even have a cat. Culture drives politics! Tell it to the Albigensians. If culture drove politics, Nazi Germany would still be Nazi.)

Of course the man of the left cannot admit that he has discovered this forbidden secret of history. Indeed with every breath he must shout its converse. But he knows it in every bone of his body, and if he is a prudent leftist his actions bear it out.

If he is not a prudent leftist? Then he takes his beliefs seriously, and speaks actual truth to actual power. Well, ya know, power doesn't like that much.

108 Comments:

Chomsky is a pretty weak mind compared to an Osama Bin Laden. Advocating outright violence against the US government would deliver him from his comfy MIT seat, so he would never do that. But he is happy to explain to you why genocide in Cambodia wasn't all that bad. The Cambodians will never come calling on him.

it's not clear to me that you've actually read anything by chomsky (if you have, feel free to correct me, but try to list books larger than pamphlet-size). the idea, for example, that chomsky would have any problem criticizing the state department baffles me.

Well, Gov. Wallace's act of civil disobedience seemed a bit of a bluff. What if he hadn't stepped aside and had to be physically moved by federalized National Guard troops in from of all the media?

This blog's early entries talked at some length about the South and how it lost the 1960s civil war. What if the South weren't as half-hearted, self-doubting, and disorganized about resistance though? What if tough guy ex-con and folk hero Merle Haggard hadn't chickened out from endorsing George Wallace for president?

Culture may or may not "drive" politics, but a bunch of, err, inbred ashkenazim happen to have an iron hold on culture and and iron hold on politics and to me the chicken/egg relationship looks pretty clear.

Reminds me of this grad student I knew in the social sciences. He read his Foucault and Deleuze. He wrote "radical" papers. Yet one day I found him complaining to other grad students about how he wasn't being taken seriously by his supervisors, and that he felt he wasn't making a social impact.

So then a week later he starts up a paper critiquing the university system itself. The major crux of his paper was that plagiarism should be used as tactic of revolution against the system (lulz). That didn't hold up so well with people, and he was pulled up in front of the university ethics board.

In 1960 and peak Cold War, the US federal government would not be able to afford another bloody civil war. And in the age of media, another Sherman's march to the sea would not play well in television.

But the South didnt need to secede. All they had to do is refuse to comply with any extraconstitutional federal directives. In other words, not bluff like Wallace did at the schoolhouse door. What would Washington's response have been if the South wanted to play chicken?

Really Mencius... linking to Wikipedia from your site detracts from your legitimacy, and authority...in my opinion.You give Chomsky too much credit, and influence here.As an alternative to the new and improved progressive totalitarianism, founded on the rock of Paul, and not Peter, neopaganism (even American neopaganism) is just not on a parr with "Beowulf". It really lacks class, and the industrial episode makes it even more unattractive. Industrial neopaganism ? Ugh.We got a preliminary taste of it during the Nazi revolutionary episode, and we are not done with it yet, I predict.The egalitarian... fever, of which Wikipedia, the Internet, etc are the most recent symptoms really is working to turn us into one world colony of ants.Already, all over Europe, scientists say that the ants are linking up into communities.. are we copying them ?Stay tuned to find out. Maybe even during our lifetime.But, just to play devil's advocate for 5 seconds, dumping on Chomsky because he is making money, and lots of it shows some childlike desire for a nice, pure leader to serve the people, the way Christ served his.. flock. Gratis, and right up to sacrifice in the Crucifixion.What new twists are we going to give to the Christian narrative ?

"In 1960 and peak Cold War, the US federal government would not be able to afford another bloody civil war. And in the age of media, another Sherman's march to the sea would not play well in television."

What you're missing is that the South greatly benefited from Federal spending from 1941 to 1960 (and after). They were hooked on that teat and they weren't going to give it up.

Not to mention, at that time the Civil War was regarded as a big giant FAIL that could not be repeated.

In 1961, Bull Connor. In 1964, MLK. You seem to think that the world we live in.

"Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest."

How can you possibly make this assumption? Swartz was prosecuted on the basis of having broken the law. Ms. Ortiz said, "stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar." In your perverted worldview, the hypothetical addition of a powerful entity (Exxon) being violated, would somehow mean that Mr. Swartz would have been off the hook. There is absolutely no evidence to support this suggestion. In fact, if you look at the recent HSBC or Syntheses scandals, you will see how forgivingly powerful business entities are treated by the US DoJ, even when their executives admit guilt to heinous crimes.

I suggest you re-evaluate your idea of what it means to be powerful. Although you probably consider your inversion of the more traditional understanding of power to be bold and intrepid (the same feeling Chomskyites get from buying into the idea of a libertarian socialist paradise), it flies in the face of reality.

In 1961, Bull Connor. In 1964, MLK. You seem to think that the world we live in.

"Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest."

How can you possibly make this assumption? Swartz was prosecuted on the basis of having broken the law. Ms. Ortiz said, "stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar." In your perverted worldview, the hypothetical addition of a powerful entity (Exxon) being violated, would somehow mean that Mr. Swartz would have been off the hook. There is absolutely no evidence to support this suggestion. In fact, if you look at the recent HSBC or Syntheses scandals, you will see how forgivingly powerful business entities are treated by the US DoJ, even when their executives admit guilt to heinous crimes.

I suggest you re-evaluate your idea of what it means to be powerful. Although you probably consider your inversion of the more traditional understanding of power to be bold and intrepid (the same feeling Chomskyites get from buying into the idea of a libertarian socialist paradise), it flies in the face of reality.

Anonymous 6:10 AM, consider the case of David Graeber, the anarchist anthropology professor. He's a despicable Cathedral toad if there ever was one -- Occupy SWPLebrity, academic lifer, and “the best anthropological theorist of his generation,” which is something like being the best economist in 1970s Leningrad.

But Yale denied him tenure, because he supported the one unionization drive that it's not OK for left-wing Yale professors to cheerlead: graduate adjuncts at Yale.

Having been raised on the false narrative of the civil rights movement - that it was civil disobedience and a plaintive cry that was heard by decent people - my generation (of Whites) tried it out ourselves, becoming anarcho-communists and occutards. It took the abject failure of Occupy for me to consider that maybe the courtesan history of the civil rights movement was written by the victors; in fact, I would discover it was actually a decades-long campaign of barratry and intimidation. Occupy was not; of course Occupy failed.

What's horrifying is that I can only thank my lucky stars that I was never in a position to do what Aaron Swartz did, because in my anarchist days I would have done it as well.

What's galling is reading the same activists who never actually stuck their necks out talk about Aaron Swartz as if they have a right to use him in death as they used him in life.

What's depressing is how I can't even begin to tell them how wrong they are on Facebook, without doing further damage to my reputation. Speaking truth to power is only acceptable if it's actually speaking propaganda to the powerless.

"Occupy" failed because they had no specific demands or objectives, and no identifiable adversary save the vague "one percent." They were kid-gloved. Bloomberg aided them every way he could. They disbanded because winter came and they still didn't know what they wanted.

But, just to play devil's advocate for 5 seconds, dumping on Chomsky because he is making money, and lots of it shows some childlike desire for a nice, pure leader to serve the people, the way Christ served his.. flock. Gratis, and right up to sacrifice in the Crucifixion.

MM is a monarchist, you know. He, as far as I know, subscribes to the great man theory of history, so yes, yes he does want that sort of thing. People do.

This whole thing reminds me of a recent debacle here in Australia that was thoroughly covered up by the media and the judicial system.

There was a guy named Adrian Bayley who raped and murdered a Melbourne female on her way home from dinner and drinks with friends. Turns out that Bayley not only had a long history of rape and violence, but also that had been let out by soft, left-leaning parts of the judicial system, including parole boards -- who let him out against the wishes of police officers in the the sexual crimes unit -- and Judge Anthony Duckett -- who only gave Bayley eight years for 16 counts of rape.

Australians were pissed about this, and started sharing information on the topic on social networks. What was the Australian media's response on this? Shut. Everything. Down.

Had Bayley been a priest raping a kid, or a Police officer beating on an aboriginal, you would have seen a royal commission into the non-policing side of the justice system. Instead, the twisted little tribe of lawyers and judges took it on themselves to squash any and all speech on the matter. Beyond dodgy blogs on the internet, and some facebook groups, it's hard to find any information on the topic now (like this Herald Sun clipping from 2002).

It was interesting watching the idiot SWPL hipsters on facebook write all this off as "Oh, the media is just obsessed with the death of a white woman anyway."

"The whole point is that civil rights protestors and others who support the leftist goals of the government are NOT prosecuted."

What are you basing this on? The fact that charges were dropped on *most* run-of-the-mill protestors during WTO in 99 and OWS in 2011 is poor evidence. I can't think of any other evidence you might be able to offer. Radical labor organizers were rounded up and jailed in the 1910s, communists in the 20's and 30s. In the 40s, HUAC did a great job silencing those leftists you insist always go free. I can think of at least 4 groups of prominent vietnam war protestors and environmental activists in the 60s who were prosecuted and convicted. Not to mention the destruction of the black nationalists and the 'new left' by COINTELPRO.

There's a reason that these groups were aggressively attacked, while Occupy was merely subjected to some surveillance and coordinated nationwide eviction. The aforementioned groups were threatening while Occupy was dithering.

I concur on early MLK. The FBI was wiretapping him, and attempted to blackmail him into suicide. RFK was involved.

I always thought Swartz had one of the most punchable faces I'd ever seen. I suppose some of that attitude, like Moldbug's, stems reading about all the things that he accomplished at a young enough age that I don't have any excuse.

This thread has been linked to on lesswrong, where various mindkilled individuals are probably coming from.

I'm guessing the anon above is multiheaded (who solely hangs out on less wrong to discuss politics, which signals how far he has been mindkilled).

As I said in another thread the moldbug/Sailer-sphere/dark enlightenment bloggers are a millennialist movement. Just like the progressive millennialists they write about. Less wrong is also a millennialist movement, but one centered on nerd culture.

That's not to say that Occupy never had goals. The original goals were prosecutions for the bankers whose fraud screwed the economy, and job creation.

Of course, there was also the terminal incoherence of demanding jobs for Americans and unrestricted immigration at the same time.

Occupy fell apart because eventually people who cared about bankers and jobs were elbowed out by communists and went home. What's left, and still using the name, are a rabble of social justice warriors pushing their causes.

Politicians of all stripes love to talk about banks and jobs, but they appear to all agree to keep it to just talk.

While I am definitely not a veteran on this blog, I had noticed that Moldbug was not exactly a defender of socialism, either in the Communist or progressive form...But the key words in my comment were "nice, pure, Christ like"...

> In fact, if you look at the recent HSBC or Syntheses scandals, you will see how forgivingly powerful business entities are treated by the US DoJ, even when their executives admit guilt to heinous crimes.

Specifics? What kind of firms are these and what kind of guys are these?

Not all private firms are part of the Adversary -- hello. And some are neutral.

You know it is sometimes claimed that Bill Gates was looking ever more the wrong kind of guy until he undertook the right sort of homages.

Facebook recently got nagged a lot by NYT. Whether a 9.2% disparatcy in tranny employment was behind it, or something more serious, I cannot guess.

I'd have to say the thesis is fairly weak. While Swarz's anti-property orientation might well be ascribed to breathing in an atmosphere Chomsky helped create, the bottom line is he's dead because he couldn't face the prospect of three years playing volleyball in a minimum security federal pen. (On likely sentencing, see Orin Kerr's recent posts at the Volokh Conspiracy). This shows the guy was essentially a pussy, just like all Occupy/Critical Mass types. A guy born before 1970 wouldn't even have flinched.

I think Swartz is dead due to good old fashioned Yiddische Mishegos (insanity). Mishegos is the flip side of Ashkenazi IQ - usually the brighter a Jew is, the crazier he is too. The prosecution had nothing to do with it - the guy had apparently been depressed for years. It might have been a trigger, but breaking up with his blond shiksa girlfriend might have done it too.

All of you, including Mencius, are far off the mark on this one. Mass solipsism. To put it simply, Aaron had a depressive mental disorder as he himself describes in a blog post from 2007, which you can read here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick

He writes: "Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness."

Let's please, please, stop all the mental disorder... shit.It is unbelievable how convenient it really is, and how it is "used" to disqualify everybody who says things that make.. us ? uncomfortable. Or do things that get us worried, and shake our incredible complacency.You can make a point that 19th century, European based psychiatry had some intellectual rigueur that gave it a form of credibility, but since the American DSM has started colonizing the world, psychiatry has has become a strong arm of the bourgeois/capitalist/work for money way of being in the world. (And in the Western countries, we are all bourgeois now, even the poor...)The day before yesterday, a French radio announcer announced that a University of Pisa team of scientific researchers had determined that Othello in the play of the same name suffered from delirious schizophrenic jealousy.In a context like this... throwing around the etiquettes makes you ? us ? sound increasingly silly.Not to mention the egregious pill popping for any little.. ache or disease.Finger pointing at so called "pussies" also looks silly in a context of generalized decadence...How many of us are shoveling earth, or doing hard physical work on this blog ? (including Mencius, and I am not excepting myself either)Not many, I.. bet. There is currently lots for lots of people to be depressed about, by the way...Or pessimistic. I am pessimistic.

There are a handful of commentators expressing *baffled* outrage. So allow me to translate: "Chomsky" here stands for a set of ideals which, Moldbug avers, can never work in reality. His thesis is that Aaron was doomed, if not to death then to great difficulties in life, by having earnestly and wholeheartedly adopted these ideals.

And this brings me to a question which is really about all the contemporary movements to free information, abolish copyright, etc: what is the new legal regime for intellectual property, with which they propose to replace the old one? It's not enough to say that information, unlike a material good, can be duplicated without depriving the original owner of a copy. For guerrilla liberation of paywalled information to be the harbinger of a new and just legal order, the original arrangement must be regarded as something that would be literally *unlawful* in the new order, must it not?

So what exactly would the new order forbid? Would it criminalize *any* form of paid access to information (as if it were the new prostitution, perhaps)? Or would such contracts be permitted, but they would all have to allow unlimited redistribution of the information once accessed? Would there be special classes of information object (such as research papers in electronic journals?) which, for the greater good, would be legally declared to have the status of public intellectual property?

Does anyone have a sensible set of proposals for what the new, better IP regime looks like? Perhaps Lawrence Lessig, or your local Pirate Party?

Mitchell: a way to protect abstract information, which would suit libertarians, is to put it behind a paywall, and then ask all those who access it to sign (electronically) a restrictive covenant. Anyone who pays for the article or book, and subsequently shares it, has violated a contract and is therefore liable to be punished (arbitrarily harshly, according to the terms to which they consented). Third parties who share liberated information would not be punishable, because they didn't sign the contract. There are also technological solutions, like DRM. These are only modest disincentives—but then the current regime is hardly foolproof.

I've glanced over the facts of the Swartz case, and it seems to me that he merely exploited MIT's lax code-based restrictions on downloading too many PDFs. Absent a well-defined contract, I don't think this should be a crime.

Much outrage is directed at the exorbitant fees charged for access to public-funded science papers. Perhaps open-access publication, at some specified venue, should be mandatory for all public-funded research.

The problem with intellectual IP is two-fold. Firstly, it is now a bugger to enforce, to the point that the law becomes anarcho-tyrannical. The majority of artists scarcely benefit from it—I've seen smaller bands put notes on their websites, pleading with fans to actually pay for the music. The law only funnels money to copyright trolls, which delight in making it inconvenient for the public to access very popular (i.e. doesn't need extra funding) content , much of which is decades old (i.e. not really incentivising creation).

Secondly, it gives the government an excuse to interfere with the internet, which is a threat to its ability to manipulate consent by monopolising trusted information sources. Ron Paul wouldn't be half as popular without the internet; neither would Mencius Moldbug. I don't think that SOPA et al are just about protecting Mickey Mouse's revenue stream. Next up, following the precedent set by SOPA would be e.g. SORA: the Stop Online Racism Act. If racist hate speech like this is unacceptable in meatspace, why should it be permitted on the internet? We've already seen how Anders Breivik was supported by a network of internet racists—these tragedies must end.

I agree with Mitchell that "Chomsky" stands for an impossibly idealistic Progressivism. But the Chomskys of the world also promulgate the mistaken belief that the Progressives haven't been running the show for the last 80 years, and that the obstacle to an ideal world is some lingering fascist power structure.

Swartz apparently operated under the assumptions that the supposedly non-progressive laws he opposed were the tools of rightists, that the Obama administration represented change from the previous administration and would be sympathetic to Swartz's point of view, and that civil disobedience is a good way to influence the powerful. He was wrong on all counts.

The law may have been passed by a non-progressive administration, but every regulation in this country gets stretched and tweaked by the various bureaucracies in the executive branch and by decades of case law; and nearly all the people with authority in these matters are card carrying progressives.

The Obama justice department is practically identical to the Bush justice department. Remember when Bush tried to fire a bunch of U.S. attorneys and he got bitch-slapped for it? The justice department is thoroughly run by progressives and it has been for decades. What would Obama change about that?

Finally, as Mencius points out more explicitly, Swartz never had a chance taking on the administration. They are at the zenith of progressive power in this country and they won't bow to some silly idealist. The administration is probably wondering "What's his problem? We won didn't we? He must be a teabagger."

The problem of access to.. elite sources is being solved for us.The more we democratize access, the less.. content is involved in what is made available, as scholarship basically collapses anyway.Look at Wiki, already...Mass market vulgarization definitely has some drawbacks. It always has had those drawbacks. Since at least the Reformation.

> Much outrage is directed at the exorbitant fees charged for access to public-funded science papers. Perhaps open-access publication, at some specified venue, should be mandatory for all public-funded research.

NIH definitely tried that. All papers were to be unveiled within a year of coming out. My impression is that it was ignored in part, but I'm not certain. Could be an interesting case study in power, and in arrogant academe.

Indeed, 20 years -- more like how it used to be in this country -- would be a reasonable period for exploitation of creators' rights. So reasonable, who could really bother to question it. A 1923 cutoff is absurd.

> Secondly, it gives the government an excuse to interfere with the internet

Which is even more important, obviously. Swartz is a friend of mine for protesting SOPA ; assorted mountains of publish/perish pdfs and stuff can kindly get bent, cause it's just not equally important. Even though I entirely appreciate what Mitchell's saying, and am being hyperbolic about publish/perish.

Actually I think ten years is suitable for novels, and more like six months max for research that comes from taxes (ie ultimately come from the barrel of a gun), with an ultimate goal of zero months for the latter.

It's not like a novel or work of history has some kind of buzz after ten years. If you were going to make decent money on it you would have already done so. Whether it's decent money or major money, you could still make /some/ more after the ten years are over, but IMO too bad for you.

> I agree with Mitchell that "Chomsky" stands for an impossibly idealistic Progressivism

Sure, chiefly a symbol or metonymy, though at the same time Chomp pretty nearly is the grandaddy of em all. And as the link details, he has the Rorty-Gore syndrome of being rich while teaching that /you/ ought to be put to work underwriting 80-IQ mega-fecundity. Not sure whether Peter Singer has this syndrome.

Wherever you see a corporation, you see a little Third Reich with its own pompous CEO-fuehrer.

USG - especially during the glorious Lincoln epoch of 1865-1932 - is supposed to be run by corporate oligarchs. The actual rulers of Guilded Age America were, of course, the robber barrons, manufacturers, and financial tycoons in Yankeeland. The Republican and Democrat presidents of the age (with the exclusion of Woodrow Wilson who nearly became FDR) were merely obedient agents of the corporate oligarchs.

As our Supreme Overlord just noted, Swartz was under the mistaken impression that corporatism is the ruling party. In fact the true ruling class is the philosopher king class which rules in unaccountable regulatory agencies such as Teach for America, the State Department, Harvard, etc, where they reign unaccountable and perfectly segregated from reality - the worst possible combination.

As a Hamiltonian/Lincolnist AKA corporatist, I can only wish we were being covertly ruled by Exxon.

Obviously you say Exxon rather than Goldman/Morgan - which I don't think would sell nearly as well even in the privacy of your own kopf. I'd be more into tycoon rule if we could keep the finance stuff out of it (whole thing is just too much of a headfuck), but how is that possible? Even then, tycoonarchy would probably rank fairly low with me.

Wilson almost became FDR! Clever.

Some other branches of business may also share, more or less, the trait of finance that I find concerning: they are lacking in sufficient concrete feedback, lacking in "nullius in verba". If a plumber screws with your can, and it still leaks, you can't really pretend it worked. Deepwater Horizon for all her greater magnitude, techne, and dignity, is not much different.

Silicon Valley runs too much on hype-y stuff -- and of course, by its very nature, on wild experimentation -- even though Thiel is really awesome I don't want to be ruled by the kind of psychology the valley presents.

The problem is, look how easy it is to cook up a phony deal using the very earthiest, ruggedest elements and motifs: agri-ethanol. Nothing older or more concrete than tilling the soil: yet they manage to wring a screwy mind-warp and fubar imbroglio out of it just the same. What He hath made crooked,...

damn. the comments on this page are f*cking retarded. occupy didn't fail because they didn't have demands u idiot, they failed because of state repression -- if they were free to stay public as long as possible perhaps they would've developed vague general values. my godddddd.

> Obviously you say Exxon rather than Goldman/Morgan - which I don't think would sell nearly as well even in the privacy of your own kopf.

had no wish to be rude by the bye, just phrased this oddly. i mean have you thought about how different it is now, US/UK at least having finance up top. im sure standard oil et al were crooked and crazy and deserved any and all beatings from the pretty great ol teddy roosevelt, --but not AS crooked and crazy.

anyway, you may know, foseti says the banks are usg, and usg is the banks. PA maintains that optimates (of some kind or another) secretly run the brahmins, whereas foseti might hold the banks and cathedral to be more relatively equal.

i think its josh who maintains that ford and/or gm is largely a bank. and i recall some interview on NPR where this dude described his growing discomfort as his airline or whatever underwent rapid quasi-bankification in ~2002-8.

I did effectively say I support rule by Goldman when I said my politics are corporatist and Lincoln apologist AKA Hamiltonian; you did know both Hamilton and Abe were famous for supporting banking interests, right? Of course I support rule by Goldman, JP Morgan, fiat money, and the Big banks, and I support it proudly and without apology.

And what is wrong with oligarchical rule by financial interests, in addition to other Big Businesses interests like the military industrial military complex manufacturers, the manufacturing sector, and the tech industry?

Business oligarchy was USG from 1865-1932, and governance then was exceptionally good. Even the rump Neo-Confederates have little to complain about (sans the unfortunate events of Reconstruction) about Yankee business rule during the Guilded Age.

If the Cathedral suffers a system wide failure, the inner party will automatically switch back to rule by corporation acting through their proxy agents in the of Republican party.

Be under no illusions that there are options for conservatism beyond corporate oligarchy. The fringe right is largely Neo-Confederate and Agrarian with a hefty dose of racial reductionism thrown in. Neo-Confederatism is, of course, a political dead end because the corporate class is Lincolnist. Neo-Confederatism would go nowhere among the American elite in the event the Cathedral is defeated.

In the absence of the Cathedral, governmental rule would be naturally restored to business tycoons, exactly as Lincoln and Hamilton intended.

Getting race realism adopted is a matter of getting the business elite to incorporate HBD into their thinking, a project which is doable considering the historic robustness of Lincolnian racism which actually rivaled Southern Confederate racism in its fanaticism.

Wow. How you take the tragic death of a single person and turn it into a personal rant against philosophies you dislike is both fascinating and disgusting. It might be time to remove your head from your anus.

If the Cathedral suffers a system wide failure, the inner party will automatically switch back to rule by corporation acting through their proxy agents in the of Republican party.

Be under no illusions that there are options for conservatism beyond corporate oligarchy. The fringe right is largely Neo-Confederate and Agrarian with a hefty dose of racial reductionism thrown in. Neo-Confederatism is, of course, a political dead end because the corporate class is Lincolnist. Neo-Confederatism would go nowhere among the American elite in the event the Cathedral is defeated.

Corporate oligarchy depends on mercenaries. Where would it get its mercenaries? In a "system wide failure" scenario, the mercs would be in a position to own the corporate oligarchs.

Also weapons production is rapidly becoming decentralized with the ongoing progress in 3D printing. This would allow the "fringe right" to prevent domination by a corporate oligarchy or to enable separatism from corporate oligarch polities.

Corporate oligarchy only needs to eliminate the cathedral and then rule through the constitution because the constitution gives the wealthy the levers of power via elected representatives.

Also weapons production is rapidly becoming decentralized with the ongoing progress in 3D printing. This would allow the "fringe right" to prevent domination by a corporate oligarchy or to enable separatism from corporate oligarch polities.

Assuming a future corporate oligarchy is even 10% as good the corporate oligarchy that ruled America in 1905, there will be no significant support for the fringe right because the vast majority of people would be happy with decent corporatist governance. The fringe right can go print as many weapons as it wants in the woods of wherever and they'd have even less support than now.

The only reason the Cathedral cares about the fringe right is because the Cathedral's incentive structure rewards creating huge bureaucracies and regulatory agencies to defend against imaginary problems, which is what the fringe right is. A remotely sane government wouldn't concern itself at all with such a nuisance.

The corporations have to follow the Cathedral edicts because the Cathedral can't be held accountable for its actions. Before FDR, the corporations were able to reign in the Civil Service via the spoils system where a new president - who had the backing of and was an agent of big business - would clear out the previous administration's staff with his own.

The progressives, in an effort to fight political corruption, severed the control elected executives had to fire Civil Service workers. Without the spoils system, the corporations for 80 years haven't had the ability to directly punish the Civil Service for screwing up. The Cathedral has now turned into a rogue dictatorial bureaucracy that has both power and no accountability.

Voting against Democrat politicians is only a band aid because the Cathedral will survive the defeat of a Democrat nominee in any given election cycle since the election won't lead to the removal of liberal political partisans.

To defeat the left the Cathedral itself needs to be unplugged. The elections are merely side shows.

What harbinger that the Goldorgan-Fed complex really wants to be freed of the celestial Brahmin mind-ray source we Moldbuggians christen the Temple -- hey, wik declared itself one in their last fundraiser -- and start a riot of sanity and responsibility, hereditarianism and renaissance? This is a bold thesis ; a few prodigies, loomings, uncanny signs might help convince. Have you received some direct (contemporary) impression of their being on the cusp of reform?

If so you aren't showing all your cards yet. Your main evidence seems to be excellence of the Lincoln epoch. So you hope it is true that history, or some kinds of it anyway, largely repeats itself in a large share of individual cases. There are many schools on that question.

Of course, the Lincoln epoch had sound money (which we could base on a basket like the rentenmark, not a single commodity).

Come on, you wrote that partly to have a ball and sass Mencius -- especially the fiat money. I admit I'm having a decent time too. Now, I already told you that the civil service reform didn't occur under FDR (I can't say whether it might not have grown new teeth though around then).

Corporate oligarchy only needs to eliminate the cathedral and then rule through the constitution because the constitution gives the wealthy the levers of power via elected representatives.

There are various ways there could be "rule through the constitution" that would reduce corporate oligarchic power and strengthen state and local sovereignty. The 10th Amendment could be restored, for example. Or the 16th and 17th Amendments could be repealed.

Assuming a future corporate oligarchy is even 10% as good the corporate oligarchy that ruled America in 1905, there will be no significant support for the fringe right because the vast majority of people would be happy with decent corporatist governance. The fringe right can go print as many weapons as it wants in the woods of wherever and they'd have even less support than now.

They wouldn't need support from urbanites if decentralized military power allows them to prevent domination by a corporate oligarchy or to enable separatism from corporate oligarch polities.

Who would protect the corporate oligarchy? Corporate oligarchy depends on mercenaries. Where would it get its mercenaries? The mercs could be in a position to dominate and own the corporate oligarchy since the corporate oligarchy would be so dependent on mercs.

There were no "edicts" forcing them to run gay ads or support gay interests.

There are dejure edicts and defacto edicts. The Cathedral's various and decentralized party organs would have gone on an insensitivity campaign with rallies by gay activists, college professors (anyone writing to their Gov about MOOCs??) who would all be demanding they be paid as diversity consult, ahh, I mean rallying for "equality" against the evil corporations.

If corporations are Cathedral then why are they demonized by the Great and the Good of the inner party? It would be odd for a propaganda agency to criticize any ally in the Civil Service: When was the last time the North Korean army publicly criticized the North Korean intelligence agency?

Regarding how the corporations handle Cathedral demands they normally try to water down the Cathedral's demands. Of course, the Cathedral is never satisfied because any Civil Service with no authoritarian warlord to report to will keep coming up with excuses to expand its bureaucratic jurisdiction. The result is private enterprise is constantly being dragged further to the left as the extremes of the left keep pulling the political mean over the cliff.

Let's take a look at Affirmative Action to see how businesses appeasement of the Cathedral is never satisfactory.

The Cathedral forces businesses to accept AA via its regulatory and judicial weaponry.

The corporations, having no electoral way to remove the Civil Service enemy from their Ivory government buildings, respond by putting their quota of blacks into positions where they will have the most minimal effect on key operations. In private the secretly pray for the courts to dismantle AA so they can be rid of the hordes of incompetent token blacks. They also cut corners by, for example, filling their diversity quota of Hispanics with the most ethnically Spaniard ones they can find so they can both meet Harvard's dictats and to sneak white labor in through the back door. This will continue until Hispanic workers are given racial purity scans to test if they have the appropriate level of "diversity" in their system or not.

The corporations are reacting rationally to threats from the Cathedral by trying to minimize the damage the bureaucracy can do to them.

The Cathedral, of course, is completely insane and wants blacks and assorted third worlders to not only be given cushy paper pushing jobs but given actual influence over the businesses core functions.

Goldman Sachs (which heavily favored Romney with donations, btw) would never willingly put blacks in charge of something important such as, oh, redesigning their database. Neither would Jeff Bezos or any remotely sane CEO. Which is most of them.

The Cathedral, because her agents have never had REAL jobs before and occupy agencies and coffee houses where they are completely isolated from reality, would not hesitate to have an ERP implementation done by Jironius, Taniqua, and the usual suspects.

If so you aren't showing all your cards yet. Your main evidence seems to be excellence of the Lincoln epoch. So you hope it is true that history, or some kinds of it anyway, largely repeats itself in a large share of individual cases. There are many schools on that question.

I find your lack of faith disturbing...

Let me put it like this, it would be hard for corporate oligarchs to do WORSE than the Cathedral oligarchs. Were they elected president, even liberal corporatists such as Robert Rubin and Eric Schmidt would not have let America fly this far off the rails as our community organizer and his predecessors have.

Goldman Sachs (which heavily favored Romney with donations, btw) would never willingly put blacks in charge of something important such as, oh, redesigning their database. Neither would Jeff Bezos or any remotely sane CEO. Which is most of them.

"Goldman Sachs Is The Gay-Friendliest Bank On Wall Street"

http://www.businessinsider.com/gayest-banks-on-wall-street-2010-10

Also, CEOs and corporations routinely outsource and insource, and allow sensitive material and technical infrastructure to be taken over by foreign parties and foreign intelligence.

The corporate oligarchs have got the MQ-9 Reaper, and the fringe right have not.

Actually drone production and development is also becoming rapidly decentralized, just like other weapon platforms and systems. In fact private, open source, DIY, etc. drones already outnumber military drones in the US.

Also corporate oligarchs need mercs to develop and operate drones anyway. So they'd still be dependent on mercs.

> If corporations are Cathedral then why are they demonized by the Great and the Good of the inner party?

I don't think Foseti quite meant that they abide in harmonic bliss. Anyway, he referred I am almost certain to banks and USG, not corps and the temple. There's somewhat more to USG than the temple. For example: those in USG who are ever concerned with making sure we can have foreign oil, which temple priests say is an evil work.

Goldorgan, and Friends in Temple & the rest of Government, seem to have cooperated rather much in replacing the Mediterranean regimes. While all this coziness comes in for a lot of criticism in temple newsletters, I think it could well be criticized far more sharply.

Look at the attention focused on some CEOs paying selves big bonuses on the occasion of their laying waste to the earth through credit mania, and the lack of attention to what happened and how we could stop having this kind of society. Not more regulations, but better regulations, right(!)? Everyone agrees! And they all bend over backwards to explain why too big/interconnected to fail cannot be solved in any simple old-fashioned way, but rather some wizardry will be needed. But what they are saying is probably shit. Jim and asdf are right, the only real answer is incredibly far shorter and simpler and more categorical regs, such as used to exist. Jim maintains that since people actually could read and understand the very short laws governing banking, they were actually laws. As he says, when there are 30,000 pages of laws or even 500 pages, there is really no law at all, because there is far too much legal space to warp around in like a video game wizard, meaning those responsible cannot really do their job of assessing deeds of men as criminal or noncriminal. They can assess whatever they want. Jim claims the regs used to pretty much be 17 pages, which means that if you and I disagree, one of us might well be convinced by the other. In any case our superior will be able to decide ; he too has actually read the 17 pages, probably even more than once. With 3,000 pages of regs with which we are pretty fluent, you and I never compelled to agree. Again following Jim the net result is that

1. the gov is essentially in the banking business, or at least able to use it for whatever purposes desired

2. "nothing is true: everything is permitted" --the covert doctrine of the final, highest circle of the hashishins, pace Nietzsche.

anonymous you are wrong, drones will not cause devolution or decentrality.

those with the most talent will conspire to make the best drones. the real drones. --the ones that will clear out all the other ones in five minutes. these will of course be F-16 like and cost hundred millions, they won't be the "lawnmower engine" ones useful for wiping out terrorists and random weddings and stuff (whoops) in the Pak tribal region.

> Let me put it like this, it would be hard for corporate oligarchs to do WORSE than the Cathedral oligarchs. Were they elected president, even liberal corporatists such as Robert Rubin and Eric Schmidt would not have let America fly this far off the rails as our community organizer and his predecessors have.

Gran'ed Guvnor. --And not found convincing. If you can't actually head upward, instead of down, well,......

> If corporations are Cathedral then why are they demonized by the Great and the Good of the inner party?

While I'm not quite sure what the inner party is (haute-elite Dems?), another point on this subject is the neoliberal economic turn, which was already strong in Clinton's first year, and I guess has a lot of older intellectual roots in Chicago. You hear about as much neolib jaw-jaw as you do anti-corporate talk.

There are also huge sociological differences involved. Dem suits (especially Big Dem suits) are more apt to lean much more neolib, and Dem hippies the opposite.

At the end of all our debate about who should be in charge, there's a radically simple bottom line. If genetic and cultural decadence continue indefinitely, then there is just no point to all our little mental activity. And if genes and culture get better year over year by as much as 0.05% (I'm guessing 1% would be a lot better for minimizing existential risks), then there's a giantic point to all our little activity.

I also want to save Whites, another goal. But the above, it seems to me, stands as an Iron Law for politik in general. A politik can't begin to be worthy unless or until it meets this standard or can be shown or made to meet it.

Whatever does not meet this standard is not Great Politics, and won't mean shit 100 years from now. You and me will one day do the final mystery of death, as alike all our friends, and it would just be too much if the West and/or world had to do so too. Mystery is the great love, is art, is god -- but that much mystery would actually be way too much. So that's why we work to set the world to stability or progress.

anonymous you are wrong, drones will not cause devolution or decentrality.

Drone production and development are already decentralized. The cat's out of the bag already.

those with the most talent will conspire to make the best drones. the real drones. --the ones that will clear out all the other ones in five minutes. these will of course be F-16 like and cost hundred millions, they won't be the "lawnmower engine" ones useful for wiping out terrorists and random weddings and stuff (whoops) in the Pak tribal region.

The biggest, "best" drones would be irrelevant unless there was aerial dog-fighting or something. And in 4th generation warfare, there's no reason to engage other drones.

There are already cheap shoulder launched thermobaric weapons capable of instantly leveling buildings and other urban infrastructure. Thermobarics coupled with cheap, locally produced drones would make urban areas quite vulnerable.

There are also "micro-drones" which could, among other things, deliver bio-weapons payloads to urban areas, which are naturally vulnerable to pandemics. Bio-weapons labs are also increasingly decentralized.

dont actually /jerk/ the concentric (contractile) movement such that you lose form or injure yourself (do a warmup set or two at rather lower weight and google other basic safety measures), --but do fuckin slam it such that it is as rapid and aversive as possible subject to the above limitations. Baseline available T/DHT will (according to my sparse reading) go up quite a lot, sustainably, both centile-wise and absoluter.

If you happen to be a straight man, be sure to use free weights only, and in any case do it in the yard all-weather, blaring Wagner. Try the Rheingold of Solti, Bayreuth 1987.

My partisanship for Lincolnist oligarchy does not change the fact the US constitution's algorithms are hardwired to result in corporatist rule. According to most of the founding fathers voting rights were supposed to be restricted to the wealthy.

Any scenario involving an implosion of the Cathedral would lead to a restoration to the default Hamiltonian algorithm: Rule by business oligarchs.

America would default back to corporatism because the private sector has not (yet...) been destroyed by the Cathedral's slow motion strangulation of business and because most of the Amerikaners want to reinstate the consitution. The consitution is really a corporate charter document whose pro-business nature is only slightly more veiled than the founding charter for the British East India Company.

Suppose the Tea Party/Amerikaners were to overthrow USG and install a pro-constituion government. The result of such a coup would be a re-installation of big business as inner party. A Tea Party revolution ends with a return of the robber barons.

And a Lew Rockwell/Rothbardian conquest of Washington DC would just lead to even more rampant corporatism since Rockwell and his mentor are more infatuated with the private sector than any Evangelical pastor.

Nor would a private sector restoration be morally objectionable under any sane interpretation of political power. It would be as strange to call a return of business rulership non-conservative as would an armed overthrow of Francois Hollande by the present Duke of Anjou (if you're of the legitimist persuasion) or the Duke of Paris would be.

You brought up the banking crisis, the banking crisis was brought about by DC, not Wall Street. USG's party organs forced Wall Street to hand out loans to cognitively incompatible and unassimilable minority groups.

You also brought up the excessive wealth of Wall Street to which I ask when has great wealth ever not been associated with conservative ruling elites? Louis VIX's Bernini designed palaces are hardly modest and the Guilded Age tycoons built the most exquisite mansions to symbolize their rule.

My partisanship for Lincolnist oligarchy does not change the fact the US constitution's algorithms are hardwired to result in corporatist rule. According to most of the founding fathers voting rights were supposed to be restricted to the wealthy.

According to you, we haven't had "corporatist rule" in 100 years. The Constitution was ratified in 1788. So for roughly half the time since it's been ratified, the Constitution hasn't lead to "corporatist rule". And "Hamiltonian" politics certainly wasn't the default after it was ratified. "Jeffersonian" and "Jacksonian" politics, which were opposed to Hamiltonian politics, were influential in the 19th century. The Constitution can thus hardly be said to have a Hamiltonian default.

Big business rule requires strong centralized government. A revolution that restored "pro-constitution government" would reduce corporate oligarchic power and strengthen state and local sovereignty. Successful revolution would embolden states and localities to resist any return to centralization.

Installing a "pro-constitution government" would mean restoring the Tenth Amendment and restraining the Commerce Clause, which has been abused by centralized power to reduce state and local sovereignty. This would prevent centralized power, including centralized corporate oligarchy.

The Constitution was ratified in 1788. So for roughly half the time since it's been ratified, the Constitution hasn't lead to "corporatist rule". And "Hamiltonian" politics certainly wasn't the default after it was ratified. "Jeffersonian" and "Jacksonian" politics, which were opposed to Hamiltonian politics, were influential in the 19th century.

From 1788 to 1860 the Hamiltonian industrialists shared power, however uneasily and tragically, in Washington with Jefforsonian/Jacksonian plantation owners.

Today, the wealthier descendents of those plantation elites have their own corporations such as Exxon and weapon manufacturers. Southern business dynamos would have a major incentive to support corporate oligarchical rule where they would have a big seat at the table.

Big business rule requires strong centralized government.

With all due respect I believe you're worried a conflict of interest between the Lincoln system states rights seen from 1865-1932 that would not be applicable to a modern political environment.

The post-Civil War states had a substantial amount of powers delegated to them by the Yankee plutocrats in Washington, Reconstruction not withstanding. Returning even 10% of the sovereignty states enjoyed in, say, 1895 would be paradise compared to what we have today. This level of autonomy would be more than enough to keep the Amerikaners from rebelling in a post-Cathedral America.

And the Commerce Clause outrages were were the fault of FDR's regency, not Lincoln's.

From 1788 to 1860 the Hamiltonian industrialists shared power, however uneasily and tragically, in Washington with Jefforsonian/Jacksonian plantation owners.

You don't understand Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics if you think it has to do with large plantation owners. They have to do with populist, yeoman farmer conservatism.

Today, the wealthier descendents of those plantation elites have their own corporations such as Exxon and weapon manufacturers. Southern business dynamos would have a major incentive to support corporate oligarchical rule where they would have a big seat at the table.

Exxon and weapon manufacturers are public companies. They're not owned by descendents of "plantation elites". And "plantation elites" were a tiny fraction of the population. It doesn't matter what "Southern business dynamos" want if they sell out local and state interests and sovereignty.

This level of autonomy would be more than enough to keep the Amerikaners from rebelling in a post-Cathedral America.

In other words, they'd be in position to make demands and express their preferences.

I didn't say yeoman farmers weren't part of the Southern coalition. But the plantation owners were clearly calling the shots in the South. And why do you think Lincolninst corporatism can't ally with farmers? The Civil War era Republican party also represented Midwestern free soil farmers.

It doesn't matter what "Southern business dynamos" want if they sell out local and state interests and sovereignty.

Southern businessmen wouldn't be selling out because a corporatist government would be friendlier towards states rights than the FDR New Deal system we are all in terror of today.

In other words, they'd be in position to make demands and express their preferences.

Yes. And if Southern businessmen have a seat at the table under a corporatist regime then what incentive is there for a rebellion against a Hamiltonian regime?

People who don't want to be ruled by a corporate oligarchy would not be swayed by a small number of "Southern businessmen" having "a seat at the table".

There wouldn't be enough support for your resistance movement to gain importance because most Amerikaners would be too delighted to rebel if the get anything remotely close to the rights states had from 1865-1932, when we were last uner corporatist rule.

So according to your logic: all the revolutionaries idealists was killed by freedom! The problem was not the british or any of the oppresors fighting against independence, it was John Locke who spread dangerous ideas! Damn you freedom, your ideology is dangerous! We must fight freedom so that people don't die in it's clawed hands! For future generations!

But seriously, we can read you like a book, you hate Chomsky because he's a threat to your nationalist/statist , whatever shitty ideology you happen to subscirbe to, agenda. You suck, sad story.

I have just heard of you, but I do know Aaron Schwarz. During the early '00s, I was managing LiveJournal and was heavily involved with RSS syndication, which was Aaron Swartz' forte.

Aaron's ideology had more to do with the internet, as opposed to Chomsky. A far more relevant description of it would be:

"information wants to be free"... which it does, as a natural state of affairs, or "The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it."

During that time, what defined his character best from my POV were his disputes with Dave Winer, who ruled over the original RSS spec like his own private fiefdom, making ridiculous attempts to control and impede its use. So Aaron forked the spec, basically, and encouraged its diversity and adaptation in ways that Winer did not foresee.

It was an amazing thing to see a young, brilliant teen debate a blustering, pompous, dotcommer who insisted on controlling that which could not be controlled. Winer had his podium, and tried to use it to crush this kid and win his argument... and utterly failed. Within a few years, syndication was forked, and RSS was being used in powerful new ways, pretty much at will.

You, with your insistence that last names make one an adult, or give their ideas more weight, remind me a bit of Mr. Winer, Moldburg.

Likewise, the charges against him were based on the idea that he committed a "crime" -- later rejected by MIT -- by downloading data from a database he had legal access to, in a way that allowed him to more efficiently access and archive that database than the wonky web interface.

Reading your article shows me a few basic things, Mr. Moldbug... it shows me that you don't understand Aaron Swartz, his culture, or his motivations. It shows me that you don't understand that he had a lot of friends and collegues who couldn't help but be impressed by his very rational, pragmatic way of improving those things in this world he considered important and something he could contribute significantly to. It shows me you don't understand why his friends -- of which he had many -- would call him Aaron, or why Aaron, a very open, communicative, intellectually generous individual, would rather be known as Aaron than Mr. Swartz. He didn't want or need the perceived authority. He had no use for it, instinctively didn't think of trading on its questionable value, and found it counterproductive. For him, the flow of information was everything, and insistence on formalities was only a childish impediment.

So, that's a bit about Aaron... hopefully, you'll be able to step outside your preconceived opinions on him, listen, and actually learn something by my mentioning it, though I kind of doubt it.

In truth, your article says more about you than about your subject. Specifically, it shows you to be jealous and envious of the attention and success given to Swartz and to Chomsky.

You admit you didn't know him, you disliked him, you reveled in his difficulties, you hated how he "equaled or even exceeded" you in ways you found important enough to mention.

Yes. Aaron created waves. However, unlike you, he also helped manifest real changes. You could learn from him, perhaps... but you likely won't.

You also talk about Chomsky as having "enormous fame and wealth", though the last time I heard, someone who can't so much as get a regular talking head position on a major network doesn't have that much influence, and someone who is a senior professor at a major school in a very expensive part of the country, who is worth only two million dollars doesn't have much wealth.

No, Moldbug. The obvious thing to see is your envy. You're envious of the trappings of success, but seemingly unwilling to do the hard work to get them. More's the shame, I guess.